In which I post a reference, mostly for myself, on how to update my chosen media server...

I'm not going to cover how to install Plex on FreeNAS as it is very easy using the plugins system explained in the docs.[1]

Upgrading, however, is a different issue. While the plugin does get updates that will preserve your data they are often quite behind the release schedule of the Plex team. Also I have had issues with some of my Plex plugins (like Trakt.tv) after using this upgrade method. In the past I have tried a hodgepodge of different methods to acheive it but now the most reliable method is using the PMS Updater script.[2]

If you listen to podcasts you won't be surprised to hear adverts for Squarespace's hosting platform. It's also what this website and my associated podcasts run on.[1][2][3] The inbuilt analytics are pretty decent but when it comes to RSS feeds for podcasts they suffer from all the limitations that tracking RSS has.[4]

Podtrac is a service that aims to fix this.[5] Unfortunately it used to be a massive faff to get it working with Squarespace.[6] Fortunately following the latest update to the platform it is now really easy.

Method

It's been a pretty exciting year for me. I've started two podcasts, changed jobs and started reviewing food and drink for Luxury London. Less travel in my new job means that I've been able to spend more of my spare time on my side projects. All in all that's lead to:

25 podcast episodes, 11 food/drink reviews, 9 blog posts

I usually make a Christmas Cake around this time of year to take to work.[1] As I now have vegan colleagues I decided to look into making it safe for them to eat. Luckily this is quite easy to achieve with a stodgy cake like this one.

In which I walk you through changing the language settings on all the things!

In an attempt to improve my German I wanted to switch the default language of websites and software I use. Also a friend had just switrched their Facebook over for the same reason and I wanted to give that a whirl. Here's how to do that for some common websites/programs.

I'm going to preface this post by saying I'm not breaking any new ground here. As is often the case, though, a beginner wanting to set-up an environment to do this will have to go to multiple websites to collect this info so I'm going to distil it into one post.

I am going to talk about Python 2.7 as currently it has the most support for libraries. This method should work equally well for Python 3 but I have not tested this.

So I've previously discussed how to set up AjaXplorer on FreeNAS 8.3 but now that jails are easier and there are new plugins I thought I'd update you all on some of the newer features (also things are much easier now!)

In which I run through a useful tip that Microsoft managed to just miss explaining...

The Problem

If you, like me, are in the process of writing a long scientific document which requires multiple reviewers to be able to view changes you may sadly be saddled with using Microsoft Word.* Now, in defence of Microsoft, they have definitely improved the way Word works. Using track changes, Mendeley and with a little bit of tinkering you can have a passable writing experience and be able to send documents out for review by your supervisors. They've even included an equation editor that allows you to put equations in your document and save them for later use.

Sadly in formal scientific writing we often like things to look nice, pretty and numbered like this...

So my work computer has been playing up a lot recently. It's been so slow that I've even had to hard reset several times. I've tried the usual tips and tricks:

turning off unnecessary services

turning off unnecessary startup programs

uninstalling unecessary programs

None of this worked. Starting up Task Manager I found that Chrome was using about 60% of my CPU even when I wasn't actively using it. This was odd so I had a quick Google...

Plugin Problems

Chrome runs plugins as separate processes (which is why there are so many processes in Task Manager called chrome.exe). If one of these has a high CPU usage you can end the process and chrome will give you an error that the plugin has crashed. You can then disable that plugin.

Annoyingly it was Adobe Flash Player causing the problems. Since I use this all the time I couldn't just uninstall it. The problem was luckily easy to solve - I had enabled hardware acceleration to fix a YouTube bug a few weeks back. Turning that off sped the computer up significantly.

Chrome's Malware Feature

Sorting out Flash did reduce the load Chrome was putting on the CPU but didn't remove all of it. It turns out that Chrome has a real time anti-malware protection feature which can use a lot of processing power. You can disable it in Settings>Privacy>Enable phishing and malware protection. This didn't have as much of an effect as the Flash problem but has helped speed up my computer. *

*If you're worried about not having the protection I've found Lavasoft Adaware to be more than ample against malware.

As with most of my Tinker posts to do with computers this is a guide to something I might need to do again in the future. You can probably find out how to do it online but I struggled with bits and am putting it here for my own and other's reference.

I am currently demonstrating a C++ lab at the University and it's good to be able to run the example code myself ahead of time. Also I am continuing to teach myself C++ as part of Project Euler.

3D image analysis just seems to be one of those things that is harder to do than I'd like it to be.

Before starting it is worth pointing out that with MRI you can acquire volumes in two ways - traditional 2D with multiple slices or a 3D scan. As far as this blog post is concerned these are the same.*

A common measure in clinical MRI is the volume of an organ or part of an organ. After all when someone has brain cancer - "How big is the tumour?" can be a very important question. Here are my experiences of trying to measure volumes on MRI images.

*There are differences between these two methods of acquisition but that would require a whole blog post on it's own.